Posted
by
kdawsonon Saturday March 06, 2010 @10:39PM
from the music-of-the-artificial-irregular-shapes dept.

gyrogeerloose writes "A French amateur radio operator who built his own ground station using equipment from an abandoned telecom uplink site has listened in on the ESA's Mars Express space probe. While his antenna is too small to allow him to download actual data, he was able to record and convert the signal of the probe's X-Band transmitter into an audio file."

They'll often spend enormous sums of money and huge amounts of time trying to do something. Many try to communicate around the world on five watts (DXers) or try to bounce their signal off the moon (EME).

The difference, however, is that usually the amateur radio types also happen to have instruments that can provide some measure of success. The also tend to do things that are far cooler than having a vacuum tube amplifier.

But maybe I'm biased... I'm an amateur radio operator, after all.

That said, I think hams usually try and decode the signal they receive. Just hearing it come in from the air is a little bit less exciting.

It's probably just an effect of it's highly eccentric orbit around Mars. On one end (apoapsis) of the orbit, it's 10,000 km from the surface of Mars, on the other end (periapsis) it's just a mere 298 km from Mars. Moving from apoapsis to periapsis might appear like "falling" towards Mars, and since there's a difference in distance: doppler effect. No need to worry immediately;-)